


Fluorescence

by Sanguinity (DirectorShellhead)



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:37:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DirectorShellhead/pseuds/Sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel gets rocked by waves of sensory overload one night; Armand tries to stem the tide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fluorescence

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler Alert: Queen of the Damned (book)

Buzzing like a million tiny flies in my mind, and I’ve got to track the source. Can’t be all in my head, not when it’s this loud, and how the swirling throng of people all around me isn’t driven mad by it as a collective beast, all at once, baffles me. Zub-zub.

I’m whirling through them like a jetty through the river and they’re just that frothy and liquid, a rolling wave of mortality. Zub-zub.

Goddamn noise. Have to find it.

A girl laughs and I scoop her up for a kiss to silence the cacophony, but it makes no difference so I join in it with her. I wield hilarity as a weapon against the press of marbled hands that come down hard on my shoulders, tugging me away in a mockery of gentleness until she’s lost, just another eddy in the crowd.

Zub-zub.

Find it fast, this fucking endless noise, or lose it. If you’ve still got it. What a joke!

I want to cry so badly that I cannot breathe.

Round the corner, and zub-zub there it is, the sickly pale of light pulsing right in rhythm with the noise, fluorescent, powdering the faces of the entering patrons with a ghastly cast of fakery. Dying bulb, dying faces, dying light.

I will never, ever die.

I shout this at the long glass tube in the ceiling of the store’s entrance. It hears me, gives one last mournful flicker, and goes dark.

I am a god.

Hands again, different placement, same creeping coldness, same threat of violence. They’re all over my face and I can’t escape the deadness of their touch. His eyes glitter gemstone-like and his hair breathes fire, and he’s saying something but I think it’s all gone wrong. There are no consonants, only vowels, and they don’t match the shape of his cruelly perfect mouth.

::Love you, love you, love you…::

This I aim like a mantra dead-center at his mind, but it falls unheeded into the abyss that separates us now, and I wonder what it would be like to follow this soundless declaration down, down, down into nothing.

There are roses everywhere, a whole wall full of them, brimming and spilling out of little plastic buckets. Cartoons of roses, little Technicolor pictures of roses, and I’m waiting for them to start singing their way out of their cellophane wrappings. A cookie-cutter man reaches out from the prison of his suit and crunches up from the morass a plastic-clad clutch of yellow roses, petals dripping to the floor like bile.

I’m going to be sick.

In a rush I break the gates of these endless hands upon me and dash to gather them up, these sad splattered cartoon petal paintdrops, from the bottomless floor. But he is there already, kneeling down to crush my wrists inside the shocking softness of his grasp, and as he shakes his head I imagine that I can see every one of the hundred thousand springing strands of hair bend against its unique curl at once.

It’s only when I hit the cool slick of glass door that I realize how hard he’s slapped me, and I wait for it, the spreading warmth of pain across my face, but it doesn’t come. What does is more overwhelming than pain has ever been or could be. The stunning tingle of it, this sensation too large to merely hurt, is so tangible that I reach up to grasp it, remove it from my cheek, examine it under the starlight.

I clutch at nothing.

Panic.

He sifts me out from the mess of it, plucks me from its center, and places me within the fortress of an embrace. I take hold of the lapels of his coat, thinking to climb up them and out of hell, but he’s assuring me that my feet are only on the ground. He kicks it once, the sidewalk, with the shining tip of his shoe, someone’s dirty wad of gum just missing a second death by way of its veracity. Just the ground.

His smile must mean that I’m laughing again, but this time it’s only because he doesn’t understand that the tip of his shoe doesn’t matter, and that there’s never been any ground under my feet at all.


End file.
